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The best answer on StackOverflow: Using RegEx to parse HTML
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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no, this is one of the worst answers on Stack Overflow
OP had a specific question to capture opening tags. The thing OP asked about can be done with regular expressions. It is true that arbitrarily nested languages like HTML cannot generally be parsed with regular expressions, but that is not what OP asked about.
This is StackOverflow after all. Your question is wrong. Your problem is wrong. You are wrong. I am right. Thread locked. Go read this other post that is totally unrelated to your problem I’ve decided isn’t the problem you’re facing because. I. Am. Right.
Could be worse. At least it's not Microsoft's support forums:
(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)
Magic may be an overstatement. I would be shocked if any of them fixed even 0.1% of the problems posted to Microsoft’s joke of a support forum where they were presented as solutions.
answers.mirosoft.com is the worst. learn.microsoft.com can be decent at times though
That’s why LLMs are so infuriatingly stubborn, they’re trained on these keyboard warriors
I had a decade old question marked as a duplicate and downvoted three times after years no no activity. SE is such a joke nowadays.
It can't be done, as an opening tag in html can contain anything in its attributes, even JavaScript (e.g. onclick handler).
??? Non sequitur
You can't parse every html opening tag with regex, because a html opening tag doesn't have a set structure. How would you match, with regex, this opening tag?
<mytag myattribute="<value of \"myattribute\">" >Is this valid HTML? My understanding is that that attribute value needs to be escaped, i.e.
<value of \"myattribute\">.The quote must not be escaped when you start with a single quote. The rest doesn't. This is valid and tested:
<img alt='my "<img>"'>It can be done with simple regex of the kind proposed in various answers there iff the html is known to be limited to the subset of html where that sort of thing can easily be made to work. The question does not tell us whether or not that is the case, so everyone is free to make their own assumptions and argue as if they know what's going on.